On 0, Arthur Dent <arthur_dent5@hotmail.com> wrote: > Hi > I just began posting on this list and thankfully received a lot of replies. > A few of them included an atachment and most of the attachments from > different people were called attach3. When I went to have a quick look at > one of them it said it was of file type pgp...is this some sort of privacy > thing??? What does it do, I dont wish to install anything untill I know. > When I had windows going I would run it through a virus scanner and all > incoming would go through zonealarm fire wall so things were pretty > tight(As far as I knew). Right now running this linux machine with no virus > scan and no firewall makes me feel soooooo vulnerable..... Welcome to the world of Linux... virus scanners are a thing in your past. That said, you shouldn't normally operate as root. Those attachments (as you will find at the end of this mail) are indeed 'some sort of privacy thing' - sort of. They are signatures to verify where the mail came from. Now don't quote me on this, but I believe the way the signatures work is that the message is signed with the author's private key, which can then only be decrypted with the author's public key. So you try decrypting the message with the public key that you trust to be theirs, and if the result is the same as the message then you can be assured that it was indeed signed with the author's private key. So its a way of ensuring that the person who is writing this letter is really who they claim they are. If you want to dabble with public-key encrypting, the I suggest: apt-get install gunpg and probably: apt-get install mutt If you want to get my public key to try it out, then you can get it from the address in my sig. Tom -- Tom Cook Information Technology Services, The University of Adelaide Classifications of inanimate objects: Those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost. Get my GPG public key: https://pinky.its.adelaide.edu.au/~tkcook/tom.cook-at-adelaide.edu.au
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pgpvC_Oxp78oc.pgp
Description: PGP signature